


Three Out of Five

by Tangerine



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-07-25
Updated: 2000-07-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 01:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15037406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tangerine/pseuds/Tangerine
Summary: Bobby reflects on his own mortality.





	Three Out of Five

**Author's Note:**

> (Author's note 2018): I think I wrote this in response to Cyclops's "death" around Uncanny X-Men 378 in 2000. Posted for the first time in 2018.

Everyone has to stop laughing sometimes. It hurts if you do it too long, you get numb and cold and then nothing's funny anymore, least of all you. I was laughing right up until the end, joking and smiling and happy, right until the bitter end. 

It's snowing, you know. Thousand of puffy snowflakes spiralling to the ground, touching my body and freezing into something more solid, something more like ice, something more like me. I have as many aspects to my personality as there are patterns of these specks of white down, so horribly anxious to get to earth, too many parts of me that don't fit to make a whole. 

I'm the happy X-Man. I'm the one that doesn't angst. I'm the one who still has hope and doesn't let the fact that we're losing the fight bring me down. Why should it? I can't change it. I can only make it better for those people less fortunate than me. I can only make them smile.

At least, that used to be me four hours ago, a day ago, ten years ago, I stopped being the shy, awkward kid and became the funny, optimistic young man. I found a reason for living and I clung to it like all the world revolved around my ability to see the joke in every situation.

It isn't funny anymore. No one's laughing now.

And I'm cold, bitterly so, when I shouldn't be. I am the Indomitable Iceman. I do not _do_ cold. So why am I shaking? Why are my hands white and pale and frozen to the touch? I haven't shivered since I was sixteen. There's something about it that wears me down, tears away at me, corrodes any strength that I have. I do not _do_ shivering.

Storm's weeping somewhere, that's why it's raining. And I'm cold, that's why it's snowing around me. I'm so fucking cold, but I can't go inside. Not now, not yet, not when I'm ... I can't even stay in human form now. I'm so ... my head ... I ...

When Jeannie died, I cried for weeks in the dark, hardly able to cope, joking compulsively to cover up the fact I was dying inside, and one day it just stopped hurting as much. And then she came back and everything was _okay_ again. I knew that death could be beaten, so I wasn't afraid of my own mortality so much anymore. 

When Warren died, I found out days after the fact, and I was numb for so long I couldn't cry. It seemed so unreal, but another part of me, a part that spoke barely more than a whisper, understood that Warren wouldn't have been able to live without those stupid wings. I cried for different reasons, but then he also came back, wrong and twisted and angry, but he _came back._ The hurt of seeing him never went away, not even to this day. The blue skin reminds us all of what we didn't do for him, of the innocent, light-hearted man we couldn't save. 

And now ... now, we've lost another one, we've lost the rock, the glue, the heart and soul of the X-Men. I don't think he's coming back. I'm waiting, part of me expects it, but another part needs to accept that we've lost another one.

Three out of five, three out of five, three. So that's what it comes down to, right? I'm scared to death that the next body they bring home is going to be mine ... or Hank. I can't think about that. You aren't allowed to think about your best friend dying. Most of us haven't even cracked thirty yet. We're all still so young.

And he was the best of us. 

Warren flies by me, eyes closed as if he trusts his wings not to kill him. They wouldn't, the fluffy ones, they wouldn't ever hurt him, not like the metal ones did. He hid it well, but we all saw the cuts, the stain of blood on everything he owned, the anger he felt toward them because they hated him just as much as he hated them.

If Scott came back, would he be like that, too? Warren only knew the touch of Apocalypse; Scott will have known something much worse. Scott will have touched the soul of that devil and not even he could have come away from that unscathed.

So maybe it's better, you know? Maybe it's better Scott doesn't come back.

"Warren!"

He stops and swoops back to me, landing lightly on the roof and looking down at me, literally. He looks menacing from this angle, as if he could actually do me harm when I know that with those wings, without the touch of death all over him, he has nothing left with which to fight. He'll be the next to die, I think suddenly, again. 

"Bobby?"

"Are you afraid of death?"

Warren smiles, sort of, as if he thinks me mad, before confessing his secret quietly. "Yes."

"Yet you still fight. Why?"

Warren smiles again, uncomfortably, wrapping his arms around his waist like he does when he's disturbed. Not a lot phases him, he's a cold son of a bitch most of the time, but a few things, like seeing children tricking on the corners to survive or hearing reports of paedophiles going after babies, they get the same response.

"You can't pretend you don't realise those wings of yours are useless."

"They're ... not," he says, faltering. They twitch against him, pulling in tighter around his perfect body as he tilts his head. Such a gorgeous man, but with a soul as black as any other. Goddamn him. He came back, so why can't Scott?

"Just don't expect me to mourn when you die," I mutter, "because you're asking for it. Those stupid wings, Warren. Goddamn it, it's all about those bloody wings, isn't it? Scott was never so vain. Scott died for a reason."

Funny, Warren doesn't get angry at this, should but doesn't. His eyes, those crystal blue beauties, just tear up and he turns his head away from me, the wings spreading out grandly. Running away, the selfish brat, like he always does.

"Bobby."

Hank. I lift my head to look at him. He's ... angry?

I could never take the look of reprimand from him, and I look guiltily away from those harsh eyes, avoiding Warren too as he stands there like a bird with broken wings. So I hurt him; I'm hurting too. Why should he be allowed to fly around and not suffer like me?

Yet a few mere words, said entirely out of malice, and he's crying like a child, trying to hide his face and pretend we don't see the tears. It felt good to hurt him, to attack someone even more fragile than me, and now I feel guilty. Guilty, for making the glass Angel cry.

Hank and Warren share a look, something they don't let me see, and Warren springs off the roof, disappearing into the snow and fog and rain. Gone, just like that. Maybe he'll never talk to me again, maybe he'll forgive me later on, I don't know. Someone had to tell him ... to warn him ... to ... _save_ ... him ...

"Bobby," Hanks says again, grasping my iced-shoulder as he sits down, using his other hand to adjust his glasses. I looked at him sadly, so ashamed of myself, always so regretful. "I do not need to tell you that you were cruel to Warren."

"I know."

Hank's look softens further. "When he has done nothing."

"I know that too."

"Your presence at dinner has been requested," Hank adds lightly.

"Not hungry," I mutter, pulling my frozen legs closer to my body as I stare across the grounds of the mansion. How many hours did we five spend out there, having fun, being kids, laughing and happy? "Will ... Jean be there?"

"No," Hanks says quietly, "she is not yet up to dining with us."

I don't say ‘good', I don't need to because Hank knows me well enough to see it on my face. He understands too, I'm sure, why I need to avoid her, why I'm not strong enough to face her right now. Soon, I'll go to her and cry and tell her I understand and that ...

That I wish it had been me.

But right now, hearing her believe he's still there, that Scott is not dead but stuck in Apocalypse, I can't take that thought. It'll break me if it's true because than means I've failed Scott, that we've all failed him.

And, "it _should_ have been me, Hank."

Hanks looks up, startled. "Why, Bobby?"

"He ... had a purpose. Me, Hank, I'm ... just here. Winter, it comes and goes but people only notice it when it snows. I'm like that, and I wish to God I wasn't. Scott was a good man, Hank, a great man, and I'm ... not. He held this dream together, and me, I find that ... I don't believe anymore. The cold has killed it, Hank, frozen all my hopes and dreams, and if I hit them too hard, the ice will shatter and I'll never get them back, so it's got to melt to save me but I'm so fucking _cold_ , Hank. And Scott ... Scott ..."

Hank wraps his arms around me, those huge and warm arms, and hugs me tightly to his chest as the ice melts away and I'm left shivering in snow. I don't want to be flesh. I don't want to cry. 

But I have to cry.

"Scott ...is ... _dead_..."

Cold kills. So that's why I'm crying; that's why I can't stop. Lying in Hank's arms, flesh and blood, he makes me feel warm again so I'm not as afraid anymore. It's still there, the fear, and I know it'll always be present in me.

Because three out of five have died.

And not one of them's been me.


End file.
